Cloud Atlas is a 2012 epic adventure drama film written and directed by Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer. It was adapted from the 2004 novel of the same name by David Mitchell. With a budget of $102 million (financed by independent sources; Warner Bros also paid $15 million to acquire the film's North American rights), Cloud Atlas is one of the most expensive independent films of all time.
With an ensemble cast to cover the film's multiple storylines, production began in September 2011 at Studio Babelsberg in Germany.
The film premiered on September 9, 2012, at the 37th Toronto International Film Festival, where it received a 10-minute standing ovation. It was released on October 26, 2012 in conventional and IMAX theaters.
The official synopsis for Cloud Atlas describes the film as:
An exploration of how the actions of individual lives impact one another in the past, present and future, as one soul is shaped from a killer into a hero, and an act of kindness ripples across centuries to inspire a revolution.
Cloud Atlas is a 2004 novel, the third book by British author David Mitchell. It won the British Book Awards Literary Fiction Award and the Richard & Judy Book of the Year award, and was short-listed for the 2004 Booker Prize, Nebula Award, Arthur C. Clarke Award, and other awards.
The novel consists of six nested stories that take the reader from the remote South Pacific in the nineteenth century to a distant, post-apocalypticfuture. Each tale is revealed to be a story that is read (or observed) by the main character in the next. All stories but the last are interrupted at some moment, and after the sixth story concludes at the center of the book, the novel "goes back" in time, "closing" each story as the book progresses in terms of pages but regresses in terms of the historical period in which the action takes place. Eventually, readers end where they started, with Adam Ewing in the Pacific Ocean, circa 1850.
The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing
Pacific Ocean, circa 1850. Adam Ewing, a guileless American notary from San Francisco during the California Gold Rush, is shipwrecked and awaiting the repairs of the ship in the Chatham Islands. While ashore, Adam learns about the enslavement of the Moriori tribe via the warlike Māori. Adam also befriends a doctor named Henry Goose, who later poisons Adam, on the pretense that he is administering medicine to him, in order to take his money; Adam has no idea, but the reader is meant to at least suspect that something was amiss. The next character discovers this story as a diary on his patron's bookshelf.
- Jim Sturgess as Adam Ewing
- Tom Hanks as Dr. Henry Goose
- David Gyasi as Autua
- Bae Doona as Tilda Ewing
- Hugo Weaving as Haskell Moore
- Jim Broadbent as Captain Molyneux
- Hugh Grant as Reverend Gilles Horrox
- Keith David as Kupaka
- Susan Sarandon as Madame Horrox
- Halle Berry as Native Woman
- Ben Whishaw as Rafael
Letters from Zedelghem
Zedelgem, Belgium, 1931. Robert Frobisher, a penniless young English musician, finds work as an amanuensis to a composer living in Belgium. This story is told in the form of letters to his friend (and implied lover) Rufus Sixsmith, which the next character discovers after meeting Sixsmith.
- Ben Whishaw as Robert Frobisher
- Halle Berry as Jocasta Ayrs
- James D'Arcy as Rufus Sixsmith
- Jim Broadbent as Vyvyan Ayrs
- Tom Hanks as a Hotel Manager
- Hugo Weaving as Tadeusz Kesselring
- Hugh Grant as Hotel Heavy
Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery.
Buenas Yerbas, California, 1975. Luisa Rey, a young journalist, investigates reports that a new nuclear power plant is unsafe, with the help of Sixsmith, now a respected nuclear physicist acting as a whistleblower. The next character receives this story in the mail, in the form of a manuscript for a thriller-type novel.
- Halle Berry as Luisa Rey
- Tom Hanks as Issac Sachs
- Hugo Weaving as Bill Smoke
- Keith David as Joe Napier
- David Gyasi as Lester Rey
- Bae Doona as a Mexican Woman
- James D'Arcy as Rufus Sixsmith
- Hugh Grant as Lloyd Hooks
- Ben Whishaw as Record Shop Owner
The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish
United Kingdom, early 21st century. Timothy Cavendish, a 65-year-old vanity press publisher, flees the brothers of his gangster client and gets confined against his will in a nursing home from which he cannot escape. The next character watches a movie dramatisation of this story.
- Jim Broadbent as Timothy Cavendish
- Tom Hanks as Dermot Hoggins
- Jim Sturgess as Highlander
- Hugo Weaving as Nurse Noakes
- Ben Whishaw as Georgette
- Hugh Grant as Denholme Cavendish
- Susan Sarandon as Ursula
- Halle Berry as Indian Party Guest
An Orison of Sonmi~451
Nea So Copros (Korea), dystopian near future. Sonmi~451, a genetically-engineered fabricant (clone) server at a fast-food restaurant, is interviewed before her execution. Sonmi has rebelled against the totalitarian society that created and exploited her kind, ultimately masterminding her rebellion. The next character watches Sonmi's story projected holographically in an "orison," a futuristic recording device.
- Bae Doona as Sonmi-451
- Jim Sturgess as Hae-Joo Chang
- Hugo Weaving as Boardman Mephi
- James D'Arcy as Wing-027
- Zhou Xun as Yoona-939
- Halle Berry as Ovid
- Jim Broadbent as a Korean Musician
- Keith David as General An-Kor Apis
- Hugh Grant as Seer Rhee
- Tom Hanks as Cavendish Look-a-Like Actor
Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After
Hawaii, post-apocalyptic distant future. Zachry, a teenaged tribesman living a primitive life after most of humanity dies during "the Fall," is visited by Meronym, a member of the last remnants of technologically-advanced civilization. This story is told when the protagonist is an old man, to seemingly random strangers around a campfire.
- Tom Hanks as Zachry
- Halle Berry as Meronym
- Jim Sturgess as Adam/Zachry Brother in Law
- Hugo Weaving as Old Georgie
- Susan Sarandon as Abbess
- Hugh Grant as the Kona Chief
- Jim Broadbent as a Prescient
- Zhou Xun as Rose
Mitchell has said of the book:
Literally all of the main characters, except one, are reincarnations of the same soul in different bodies throughout the novel identified by a birthmark...that's just a symbol really of the universality of human nature. The title itself "Cloud Atlas," the cloud refers to the ever changing manifestations of the Atlas, which is the fixed human nature which is always thus and ever shall be. So the book's theme is predacity, the way individuals prey on individuals, groups on groups, nations on nations, tribes on tribes. So I just take this theme and in a sense reincarnate that theme in another context...
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| Screenplay by |
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| Based on | Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell |
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| Cinematography | |
| Editing by | Alexander Berner |
| Studio | Cloud Atlas Production X-Filme Creative Pool Anarchos Production |
| Distributed by | Warner Bros. Pictures |
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| Running time | 172 minutes |
| Country | Germany United States Hong Kong Singapore |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $102 million |
| Box office | $9,400,000 |
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